The Okra Intercession

The other day one of my housemates boiled some okra. My other two housemates are teachers in the public school system, and were out for the summer. It was my housemate, the okra, and I. He was boiling the okra in a sauce pan, stirring it blandly with a wooden spoon. It boiled for about twenty minutes before he turned the gas out from under it.

"Try one," he said, "it's okra... it's good..."


He tried to feed it to me from the wooden spoon. I took the okra with my fingers and put it in my mouth. I chewed it, using the tongue to explore the flavor. The little green piece of vegetable released some of its familiar flavor, then it proceeded to fill my mouth with slime. It wasn't natural.

I spit it out onto a napkin. It was disgusting. I researched the subject in the internet. Many warned about the slime released in boiling okra. I came to find out a posteriori, of course. As I was about to inform my housemate about what I had just experienced and learned, he took the wooden spoon with two or three pieces of okra and put it in his mouth.

The look in my face must have been half awed and half disgusted. He chewed and swallowed, all the while staring calmly with a smirk on his face from his place in front of the gas stove. "I actually like the way it tastes..." he mumbled. 

It hit me at once why I liked it and he didn't:


He was gay and I wasn't.